ANTIQUE LITERACY

wd u b wrrid abt wot qv migt thnk?

One-hundred-year-old pen and ink letters, written by Winston Churchill to and from his friends and colleagues, show that the abbreviated-thumb-text-messaging styles utilized by today's teenagers on their cellphones, so often to the despair of their teachers, appear to be nothing new.

Churchill and his high-titled relations and cronies, highly skilled and educated in the literary arts as they were, liberally spattered their correspondence to each other with such timesaving abbreviations as:

cd —could; wd—would; vy —very; and w/o—without; even Brit—British; and many other like fragments of shorthand.

So even in the most exalted enclaves of precious literacy, when exchanging simple and informal messages, language just ain’t immune to lazy timesaving shortcuts.